News

Material and social deprivation: the EU endorses a new indicator developed by LISER

A new indicator developed under the coordination of Anne-Catherine Guio, senior researcher at LISER, has been endorsed by the European Commission and all 28 EU countries. It is now part of the major monitoring tools used for measuring EU progress in the fight against poverty and social exclusion.
This EU funded research was carried out by LISER in close collaboration with the University of Bristol (Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research).

Since 2000, EU cooperation in the field of social policy has been organised around a set of key objectives. Progress towards these objectives is monitored using EU social indicators commonly agreed between the Commission and Member States. One such indicator is a measure of material deprivation endorsed in 2009 whose robustness needed to be strengthened. After several years of international comparative research funded by Eurostat (the Statistical Office of the European Union), Guio, Gordon and Marlier (2012) and Guio, Gordon, Najera and Pomati (forthcoming) identified an optimal set of 13 material and social deprivation items which allow constructing a highly robust indicator. Six of these items were already included in the 2009 measure (which was based on 9 items) and seven are new.

As a result of this research, the seven new items proposed by Guio and her colleagues are now included in the core questionnaire of the EU reference data source for income and living conditions (EU-SILC). So, all 13 items are now collected every year in all EU countries and a number of non-EU countries. These items are as follows:

On 15 March 2017, the EU endorsed a material and social deprivation (MSD) indicator based on these 13 items.

The MSD rate is the proportion of people lacking at least five out of these 13 items. Figures show the large diversity of MSD in the EU, with percentages ranging from 2% in Sweden to 48% in Bulgaria (5% in Luxembourg).

Although income poverty and deprivation are closely linked, there are situations where (income) poor people manage to avoid deprivation thanks to the high general standard of living in the country, high in-kind social benefits and available savings. Conversely, there are situations where non-poor people suffer from deprivation due to low standards of living in that country, high personal costs (housing, education, mobility, health…) or accumulated debt. Both indicators are therefore useful to understand different aspects of poverty and social exclusion.

Guio, A.-C. (2009), What can be learned from deprivation indicators in Europe?, Eurostat Methodologies and Working Papers, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

Guio, A.-C., Gordon, D. and Marlier, E. (2012), Measuring Material Deprivation in the EU: Indicators for the Whole Population and Child-Specific Indicators, Eurostat Methodologies and Working Papers, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.